We’ve decided to discontinue DreamSpeed CDN. It didn’t live up to our expectations and its integration was limited to DreamObjects. There are many CDN providers that will work with DreamObjects, just look for one that’s “origin-pull” compatible.

Our records indicate you have DreamSpeed CDN enabled on one or more of your DreamObjects buckets. We will discontinue the DreamSpeed CDN add-on service on November 30, 2017 to make way for future enhancements to DreamObjects. DreamSpeed CDN didn’t quite live up to our expectations, and we’ve made the difficult decision to wind it down.

All data stored in your DreamObjects buckets will remain safe and unaffected once DreamSpeed CDN reaches the end of its natural life.

Existing CDN URLs will begin redirecting to the non-CDN URL once the service is discontinued, however we do still encourage you to update your links to point to the non-CDN URL.

If you’d like to retain CDN functionality for your DreamObjects data, you can set up a new account with any “origin-pull compatible” CDN provider. Fastly, StackPath, and Cloudflare are just a few popular options.

If you’re using the DreamSpeed CDN WordPress plugin, it will be retired and the final update will revert your content to using the default configuration for media storage. Keep an eye out for updates in your WordPress admin dashboard.

Thank you for your support of DreamSpeed CDN. We hope you found it a valuable and easy-to-use CDN option!

Well, it certainly lived up to mine. It’s sad that once again DH is phasing something out without giving us a really good reason why. I would certainly like to know what was wrong with it before I sign up with somebody else, only to have to go through this again in two years.

Will the aliases that we assign to a bucket still work? Will files still be accessibly via a browser through those aliases?

I’m happy to go through the thinking in deciding to EOL DreamSpeed CDN. There are several reasons why it didn’t live up to our expectations, but the main reason is that a CDN didn’t match most customers’ use case – primarily backup, archive, and disaster recovery. These customers need reliable storage in an offsite location and they make up the majority of DreamObjects customers.

We also saw a lot of customers wasting money on DreamSpeed CDN because they didn’t use enough traffic. Customers would enable the CDN, but traffic levels wouldn’t be enough to keep the cache warm. That meant data was constantly being resent to the CDN to warm the cache and then delivered to the end user, adding an extra step and defeating the purpose of having a CDN in the first place.

There were also several technical issues that contributed to the decision. We created a temporary “kludge” to get the mapping redirection to work because of an imperfect integration with the provider. An ideal integration API was never created and the kludge became permanent. We were also never able to implement additional features like single key purging, restricting CDN hits to specific regions, and automating setting of cache headers.

kjodle:

Will the aliases that we assign to a bucket still work? Will files still be accessibly via a browser through those aliases?

Yes, we are going to continue supporting the existing CDN URLs any aliases that point to them to make the EOL as seamless as possible.